Simply Vegetable Gardening Simple Organic Gardening Tips for the Beginning Gardener

By Cygnet Brown

With food prices on the rise, more of us are starting a vegetable garden for the first time in history. This guide shows how you can learn to start an organic vegetable garden using easy to grow vegetables that extend your harvest from early spring until the snow flies in winter.

Cygnet Brown is not a novice gardener. She has over forty years practical gardening experience under her belt. For her, organic gardening principles are not simply a philosophy, they are a way of life. Without using chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides, she has managed to grow many of the family's groceries and has improved the soil in her corner of the planet as well. Her use of this natural, practical philosophy stems from the premise that "healthy soil produces healthy plants."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cygnet Brown
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310588174

Cygnet Brown

Cygnet Brown (1959-) Born in Northwestern Pennsylvania, began writing stories in seventh grade English class. From that time on she wanted to become a professional writer, but life got in the way. After graduating high school, she served on active Navy from 1981-1987 as a Neuro-psychiatric Technician then in the reserves until 1999. She married, became a mother to three children, step mother to another, and became a nurse.She returned to writing in October 2008 when she fell in love with her characters all over again. With this renewed passion, she wrote her first book in The Locket Saga: When God Turned His Head. In 2012 she published her second book of the series Soldiers Don't Cry. Her third book, a nonfiction book is aptly named Simply Gardening.Her next book, Book IV of the Locket Saga: A Coward's Solace came out in August 2016. In December 2015 she came out with two booklets: Help from Kelp and Using Diatomaceous earth Around the House and Yard. She substitute teaches high school, middle school, gifted middle and high, and special needs students K-12.Cygnet keeps busy writing a book about editing called Beyond the First Draft and working to develop the Jerjoboch Learning Center, a center that teaches children and adults as well how to live cohesively with nature using permaculture systems.

Book preview

Simply Vegetable Gardening

Simple Organic Gardening Tips for the Beginning Gardener

Cygnet Brown

Published By Cygnet Brown at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Donna Brown

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

My Credentials

Part 1 Gardening Basics

Part 2 Early Spring Garden

Part 3 Midsummer Garden

Part 4 The Vegetable Garden After the First Frost

Part 5 Enjoying the Harvest

About Cygnet Brown

Other Books by Cygnet Brown

Contact Cygnet Brown

My Credentials

You may wonder why I think that I know enough about gardening to write a book about it. Well, I started gardening, specifically organic gardening over 40 years ago when I was twelve years old in my parent's backyard. I did not have much money to work with, so I learned to make do with what I had available to me. I quickly learned what most people considered household garbage, earthworms and other subterranean flora and fauna considered food. I learned that a fancy compost bin was not necessary or even desirable for building healthy soil. I learned that if I buried my household garbage in the ground, flies would not be attracted to it, and in less than a week, where there had been garbage now contained a large earthworm population. After a few years, I graduated high school, joined the military and left that garden behind. After getting married, however, and having my first son, I had another backyard garden, this time instead of the sandy loam of my mother's backyard in Northwestern Pennsylvania. I was practically starting my garden on a beach on the Virginia coast. The soil was sand, no loam. I began adding household garbage to that garden as well. Because it was a warmer climate and the soil was not that good, I made the garden smaller and by the time my tour of duty was completed, my garden soil looked fantastic. Next, I moved to the Missouri Ozarks where I lived on a commune for several years. There I learned even more about organic gardening. I learned that it was possible to eat what I grew in the garden. While I lived there, I learned that what many people thought was true really was not. Sawdust could be used as mulch in the garden without poisoning the soil. Sawdust just needs to be aged a couple of years before putting on the garden. After leaving the commune, I lived on rental properties and at every different home, I built another small, organic garden on soil that before I started, I often joked would only grow rocks. Every time I left behind a garden, I had to leave the soil I had created. In a sense, I had become a Johnny (or perhaps I should say Joanie) Appleseed of organic gardens.

A few years ago, I was in nursing school and one day I was reading an old book by J. I. Rodale called The Complete Book of Composting. At the same time, I was studying my anatomy and physiology book and studying about the human cell. Reading the information in tandem as I was, I discovered that many significant similarities existed between the human cell and the actions of a compost pile. What I realized was that just because we add nutrients to the soil, does not mean that those nutrients will be accessible by the plants in the area. Thinking of the processes of the earth as chemistry was not accurate at all. As I compared the various organisms of the compost pile and the earth in general with the human body, I realized the synergy that occurs between the various organisms. One cell in the human body had a synergistic and interdependent connection with every other cell. In addition, in the earth, as in the human body a buffering system exists which creates homeostasis. A compost pile will start out acidic, but if allowed to mellow, will neutralize if given the proper elements with which to work. The processes of the earth are biological, not chemical. It is as though, just as the human body is made up of billions of individual cells, because of countless organisms on our planet all working together, earth is truly a living breathing organism.

Though I came upon that realization on my own, I am not alone in this perception nor was I the first to think this way. In 1978, Bill and David Holmgren came up with the word permaculture, which stands for permanent culture, as it was seen that social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system. This idea was inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming philosophy.

If you have read any of my online gardening articles, some of the material in this book may appear familiar. I have been writing online articles on Hubpages about the specific vegetables, so much of the information that I wrote about the specific vegetables in those hubs are included in this book. However, even though the information in those articles is incorporated in this book, this book is not simply a rewrite of those articles. I am certain that you will find that Simply Vegetable Gardening more informative than anything that I have written online.

Part 1 Gardening Basics

Garden Location

Whenever I have started one of my gardens, the first task in vegetable gardening that I had to accomplish was to determine the ideal location for my garden and how much area I wanted to devote to it.

If you are new to gardening or you have not been gardening in your current location before, planting a small garden rather than a large will give you better results because you will better be able to supply the time and resources for making your garden a success. If this is your first garden, limit yourself to a small 5x8 foot bed and learn to make the most of that garden space. Place the bed so that one end is to the east and the other end is toward the west giving the garden a north-south orientation. Put up vertical support down the middle of the plot. On the north side of the bed, you will plant cool weather loving plants. On the south side of the plot, you will plant warm weather loving plants. For instance, if you plan to grow both cool weather-loving peas and warm weather-loving tomatoes, plant peas on the cool weather loving side of the vertical fence as soon as the soil can be worked. Later, after all danger of frost is past, Plant tomatoes on the south side of the vertical support.

Ideally, the best place for your garden is a location that has at least six hours of sunlight per day, well drained, and contains rich garden soil. Therefore, what do you do if you have is a shady back yard with hard-packed dead rock and clay subsoil that water runs off?

Some isolated spots in your garden may have the full six hours so you can grow specific plants in those locations. To make the best of what I have, I learn to work around these types of obstacles. For instance, spring leaf lettuces although they may grow slowly actually do fine in the shade and may actually do better during the summer in a shady location than the bright sun. Peas or beets can be planted and begin growing before the leaves come out on the surrounding trees and then allowed to grow and harvested in the trees’ shade.

As you will see, there are a number of vegetables that you can grow in the shade, however, what can you do if you want to grow a vegetable that does not like the shade. This is where your imagination and determination comes in. For instance, what if you want to grow tomatoes, but you do not have any area around your house that offers six hours or more of sunlight you have to become creative. If you really want to grow your own tomatoes, you could plant tomato plants in containers and move them from the east side of the house in the morning to the west side in the afternoon by putting it on a moving cart of some type. By rolling your tomato plant on the cart from the east side of the house to the west side, you can extend the hours of daylight for your tomatoes. Another possibility is that you could utilize mirrors or lights to lengthen your garden’s daylight. Use your imagination and experiment to discover what works for your specific situation and what does not. You would be surprised what you can accomplish is you simply learn to utilize what you have.

Vegetables you can grow in the Shade

On almost every vegetable seed packet that I have ever read, says that the vegetable needs full sun that is at least six hours of direct sunlight per day. I mentioned in the last section that some vegetables exist that can grow and grow well in the filtered light of the shade.

During the first couple of months after the soil can be worked in the spring, leaves are not yet on the trees so that any plants planted in the garden where it is shaded by deciduous trees during the summer will have full sun during the plants early and fastest growth. Once the trees get their leaves, the growth of the plants will slow down, but they also will not bolt or go to seed as quickly as they would if they were planted in the full sun.

Preparing a Garden Bed for a Shade Garden

When choosing an area in which to plant your shade garden, consider what the soil looks like where you are planting. If you soil is not easy to work, or if your soil is full of roots because you are near the tree, you probably will want to use